I swing back and forth on my opinion of The Hobbit movies. From what i understand the book is quite different in tone to the later LotR books, more child-friendly, and the movies reflect that.
I don't think these latest Middle-Earth movies are bad - they certainly aren't as disastrous as the Star Wars prequels - but they suffer from poor pacing, an over reliance on CGI, and the padding is sometimes very noticeable throughout. Martin Freeman is also criminally under-utilised playing the title role, and the different dwarves are not fleshed out enough for me to care about them much. I imagine there will be many fan-edits that whittle down the trilogy into a single, focused, more cohesive movie (there already is one!). I would have loved to see Guillermo Del Toro's original vision as he intended it to be only two movies, and knowing him probably a lot darker in tone to PJ's efforts.
To be fair I haven't even seen the third one, but I'll be buying it upon release and watching them all back to back, possibly with the LotR EE trilogy afterwards!
